Feature -Mountain culture and performance art

Alien observations of Celebration 2010

A travelling caravan of IOC members, officials, media and assorted clingers-on, for whom Whistler will crank up its charm-meter, like debs at a ball looking to lose their virginity. With the arts council taking the conductors baton, Whistler groups have been tuning up for over a fortnight of festivities and celebration; all to play to a score composed by the bid corporation to convey the image of a thriving, energized place thats simply ideal for hosting a globally telecast event like, uh, say, how about the Winter Olympics?

Celebration 2010 (Feb. 14-March 8) is being touted as a province-wide celebration of Canadian culture in support of the Games bid. The $880,000 behind Celebration 2010 has been kicked in by all three levels of government. The money is a clear acknowledgement that a key aspect to a successful bid is a thriving and diverse arts and cultural community. With the spotlight on, a host country suddenly drags its neglected artists to centre stage, to show off its incredibly enlightened culture. (This might best be exemplified by the Australian governments eagerness to embrace and showcase indigenous art during Sydney 2000, even as they simultaneously refused to offer the aboriginal people any kind of apology for a systematic forced removal of young Aboriginal kids from their families into mission schools during the 50s and 60s.)

The Vancouver 2010 Bid Corporation has also implied that if we are successful in the Vancouver/Whistler bid, the pot will suddenly be overflowing for local cultural initiatives. And we can showcase to the world a place humming with mountain culture.

But hang on there. Mountain culture? Isnt that like military intelligence. Government organization? Or a sustainable Whistler? An anthropologist from another galaxy (lets use an alien to assume a level of objectivity that Olympic officials are hardly renowned for) sitting on Cittas patio and observing the local bipedal wildlife would surely be forgiven for drawing a question mark next to that entry in their notepad.

Culture

: ? Abundance of fleece and Gore-tex. Always armed with some kind of prop  wheeled contraptions, decorated planks, either broad, or long and narrower in pairs. Subjects smoke profusion of a forbidden weed. No other signs of significant cultural development or advancement.

Culture, from the Latin word for cultivating or tilling, encompasses both a growing medium, and the fruits of that work. Alexander Solzhenitsyn defined "culture" as the development, enrichment and improvement of non-material life. Our alien observer might hypothesise, uncannily astutely, that culture, meaning a thriving, vibrant, energized, artistically inspired community, cant exist where the average family dwelling is galactically priced. Yawn. Peoples resources are already stretched thin just scrambling to meet the demands of material life. Assuming theyre interested in anything other than snow sports and real estate, anyway.